Our English friend Yorkshire Pudding took me to task in a comment on the preceding post for having made reference to Red Skelton’s television program.
“Dear boy,” he said, “over here in the birthplace of the English language we use ‘programme’ for television and ‘program’ for computers.”
For your information, I used U.S.-style punctuation in the previous sentence. Here is the same sentence using British-style punctuation:
‘Dear boy,’ he said, ‘over here in the birthplace of the English language we use “programme” for television and
“program” for computers’.
Count the ways in which the two sentences differ. How many differences did you find?
I found nine. Do you need to go back and count again?
There are many well-known differences between the two countries in the spelling of words as well.
And then there are people like me who are free spirits and use what ever comes into our head. What are you going to do with us.
ReplyDeleteRed, we have several language-police teams working night and day trying to figure out what to do with people like you.
Delete‘Dear boy,’ he said, ‘over here in the birthplace of the English language we use “programme” for television and “program” for computers”.
ReplyDeleteThe first thing to note is that the quotation mark at the start and end of the second quote do not match so there is an error there.
I use English and would have written
“Dear boy,” he said, “over here in the birthplace of the English language we use ‘programme’ for television and ‘program’ for computers.”.
I hesitated over the final full stop.
I stand to be corrected.
Graham, I caused the confusion. The error you pointed out was mine, not YP's.
DeleteThe original sentence from YP looked like this:
Dear boy, over here in the birthplace of the English language we say "programme" for television and "program" for computers.
I introduced the error myself when I tried to make a quotation out of the whole thing.
Your version looks just like how I would write an American version except for the .". at the end. You are being over-scrupulous, I think. One full stop is enough although two is probably what preceding generations would have done. I had a friend 50 years ago who worked for IBM at High Wycombe in England; he always wrote 'bus instead of bus because it was, he said, a contraction of omnibus. I don't go quite that far on the nerd scale.
I thought you blokes used single inverted commas for first quotations and double inverted commas for any inner quotations, but apparently I am wrong.
I should never have jumped into the deep end of the pool with you big guys as the water is definitely over my head.